We got Dragons!

Click on the illustration above
To enjoy the true beauty of this California dragon

Walking in the park

Today I met a dragon

California!

Persimmons on Parade

Thanks to my good neighbor Jen, we have persimmons this year. I know I could buy them at the downtown Farmer's Market, good ones too. But, around here, buying persimmons is like having to buy lemons. It feels wrong.

I scored both types that grow in the area, Fuyu and Hachiya. We actually have a Fuyu tree in our yard, and we used to get a lot of fruit from it. But no more. The squirrels scored all but one pathetic half of a fruit. Or maybe it was the raccoons. They were certainly busy with our small tomato patch this year.

But, luckily for me I scored with the homegrown persimmons. Of course, as y'all know, the Fuyu are the kind you eat hard. You can eat them out of hand, but we are pretty partial to them in our regular big supper salads. Tonight we had our first local crab salad of the year. Hooray for crab season! The pairing of persimmon and crab is right up there with apples and honey, mashed potatoes and gravy, or apples and cheddar cheese. Some flavors were just meant to go together.

I used some of the ripe Hachiya (you never want to eat those astringent guys until they are good and mushy) in a persimmon cake for Thanksgiving. I lost my original recipe, but there are variants on the web and I just played around with what I found. I'm not actually sure what I ended up putting in other than buttermilk, plenty of persimmon, dark raisins, local walnuts, and no oil or butter. It's basically a very minimal any-kind-of-oil-or-butter with 3 ripe persimmons (about a cup and a half of fruit). Delicious. That is what fruit cake should taste like, not heavy but dense and rich with fruit.

I'm partial to these little darlings in a smoothie with frozen bannana, milk and vanila as well. Heaven. I better freeze up those other two Hachiya's right now so I can have one tomorrow. BTW if the Fuyu get over ripe they work in any of the same way as their astringint cousins. That's why we planted a Fuyu tree. You get the value of both types of fruit.

Good simple California eating. Could food grow any better?

The Lady Wears Shorts: Part 1

These shorts are a little loose at the
fitted waistband now because
I lost a little weight.
I made the first pair with belt carriers and
I think I'll do that on the third pair too. 

A few  favorite postings

OK, I admit it's not all shorts with me 

Romancing the Dress Part 1: Dainty

Romancing the Dress Part 2: California Romantic asks do skirts really fit into her active and arty modern life?

Romancing The Dress Part 3: The Dress Comes to Life

They aren't glamorous or high fashion, but I probably wore shorts every day this summer.

Since I much prefer to wear things I create myself, I was really happy that I found a shorts pattern that worked well for me this summer, McCalls 6403. I made two pairs of shorts out of this pattern, and could have used three. (Yes, your right I have another pair cut out in my sewing basket .)

Actually I created a third pair from another new pattern. In the process I found a style that is decidedly unflattering for my H-shaped figure. I'm never going to make those right-at-the-hip cargo pockets again. However, shorts are still so practical that I have even gotten a lot of wear out of the never-again shorts. I wore them several times in the garden and for hiking. They only work with my big loose boxier tees, and I only have a couple of boxy tees that I've made that I like.

I walk or hike every day, and shorts seem like a basic, practical requirement, but I remember when women couldn't always put practical first.

When I was growing up, there were lots of places where women were discouraged from wearing anything other than skirts or dresses.  During elementary and middle school (we called it junior high then), we were required to wear skirts and dresses. Our public school system saw themselves as the gatekeeper when it came to teaching us how to be ladies. When we challenged the rules and wore pants, they sent us home to change, or called our parents. Unhappily for the school administrators, when they called my liberal mother she gave them an earful of her ideas on females making their own choices when it came to what a lady wears!

Shorts make hooping work. Try this in a skirt!

Before my family moved to California, we lived closer to a small town in Mexico than we did to the U.S. town to which our mail was delivered. When we crossed the Arizona border into Mexico we always changed our shorts for a skirt, because at that time prostitutes were recognized by their clothing, and nice women didn't wear any kind of pants. Even my feminist mother wasn't going to battle the norms within another culture. On went the skirts as we once more assumed the accepted role of ladies.

I'm really glad my modern day California culture supports my wearing the practical clothes that makes my life comfortable.


Coming Soon Techniques and Challenges for this pattern

Part 4: Cradle Songs and Distant Melodies,Whiskey in the Jar

Cradle Songs and Distant Melodies

Part 4: Whiskey in the Jar

Any customer of Period Pilots (serving the needs of the Time Travel Community since A.D. 476) knows that the best way to help answer the commonly-asked question, “Where do you come from?”,  is to step a little farther back in time.

As I’ve said previously, in this journal, my background isn’t only dependent on my bloodline. It’s a collage of experiences from all the people who have influenced me and mine. Some of those folk came from within the family circle and others, just as importantly if not more so, stood outside of it. Because of this, my cultural background includes Henry and Stan in the 1980’s. It includes a Midwestern librarian and farm folk in the 1930’s. And today, with a little help from an old song, I learned a little more about where I'm from.

* * *

I was singing a tune I’d thought was from times long gone, when I was reminded that some times have never truly vanished. There’s more than one way to be carried along back through time, and there’s nothing like a song sung in the right mood to take you there. This one carried me along to one more of the places it appears I’m from.

As I was going over the far flung Kerry mountains


I met with Captain Farrell

And his money he was countin’.

I first produced me pistol,

And I then produced my rapier.


Sayin’ stand and deliver…..

I was humming the old melody to “Whiskey in the Jar” as I trotted along a little hiking path through Edgewood Park. The original song, celebrating the prediciment of the ‘oft times admired highwayman, was widely sung in the Ireland of past times, and continues, I’ve been told, to be a pub favorite today.

If you give me the once over you’ll be pretty sure that many of my ancestors must have graced those emerald shores. The land of Éire didn’t provide enough in the way of sustenance however, so they lit out for Ameriky as soon as they could find the passage money. For all I know, they may have collected the guineas and shillings they needed for that, from the pockets of the passengers they stopped when they held up coaches on the toby roads of the Emerald Isle.

When the path headed downhill into a heavily forested hollow in the terrain, I began to sing that song, I’d learned a long time back. I learned it so long ago that, in fact, I don’t remember having been taught to sing it. Perhaps it was just born in me, that song.

Maybe it was the intense grassy greenness of the little dell I was passing through at the moment, or perhaps it was that the frolicsome water in the creek below, bubbled up and joined me in the refrain.

Musha ring dumma do damma da 


Whack for the daddy 'ol


Whack for the daddy 'ol


There's whiskey in the jar.

Time travel on a song turns out to be one of the more pleasant methods of transport I’ve found to date. It has a way of pulling you straight into the melody. Before I knew it, I was part of the story of that old ballad. But it was a song somewhat different from the one I’d sung so many times before.

One thing I knew for sure. I wasn’t in Edgewood Park anymore.

…..Next Time: The Highwayman’s daughter


Listen to this entire story in the April Edition of "Unpolished Performances", a free podcast in the iTunes Store. Download it by clicking on this link.

Part 3: Cradle Songs & Distant Melodies- My Neighborhood

Part 3: Cradle Songs and Distant Melodies

 My Neighborhood

My young adulthood in our first house has a lot to do with the ‘where do you come from’ question I've written about in the first two parts of this series. That house sat in an unincorporated zone known locally as ‘The Avenues’. My nearest neighbors came from Samoa, Colombia, Iran and Minnesota. And those were just the people I was closely acquainted with. I’m not sure where the guy on the corner, we called the ‘Christian Biker’ came from. A heavily muscled, tattooed, ancient car-fixin’ veteran of the Vietnam War, he took in a variety of woebegone characters, fed them and got them back on their feet. He was also the fellow who explained to me that the gunfire we heard periodically in the neighborhood was ‘automated weapons fire, Honey’. Eleven years in the house on Twelth Avenue means I’m from The Avenues.

The people I worked with, shaped my ideas as well. There was Henry, an African-American man who’d just moved to San Carlos by way of Georgia. He scorned the custard pie in the cafeteria as not being fit for pig food.

And there was Stan, whose Latino ancestry was stamped plainly on his face. Stan had worked his way up the career ladder, from an assembly job in Detroit. He’d heard about an early programmer training opportunity in the sixties, and taken advantage of it. Stan walked like a toreador and he dressed like Saville Row. One of the supervisors once looked scornfully at Stan’s beautifully tailored three piece suit and told him, “You know you don’t need to dress like that”.

“I’m comfortable,” Stan replied proudly.

Stan, Henry and I were a little outside of the group of other programmers. We were non-standard. I, because I was the first female programmer hired in. Stan and Henry for the color of their skins, and their accents. The two older men could have shunned me and made fun of my general naivete. I was only twenty-three years old, there was an awful lot I didn’t know about people and work, and I was so young it didn’t occur to me to hide the fact. Instead Stan and Henry took me under their collective wings and taught me how to survive at work, how to stand up for myself and, most importantly, how to laugh up-my-sleeve at the local customs.

We had a supervisor named Joseph. Joe was only a few years older than me, somewhat pretentious and pedantic. He walked a bit like a pigeon with his chest stuck out a little farther than normal. Joseph would ask us questions like ‘Now do you think of your job as just a job, or as a career?’ “Gee,” Stan laughed after Joe walked away with his characteristic strutting walk, “I wonder what the right answer to that was supposed to be?”

Joseph liked to walk in unexpectedly, and sit us down for motivational talks. These included little chats about team work. Periodically he’d consult a magazine article in which he’d underlined items he clearly thought were winning phrases.

Henry thought I was responding a bit too much to Joseph’s pep talks. “Hey it’s Little Joe!” he said when I came back in from one of our supervisors supposedly impromptu and friendly, one-on-ones over coffee. I learned a lot about attitude and what team work really meant, from Henry.

In a small, but very decided way, I’ve come from the places that my neighbors and co-workers are from.

Next Time: Whiskey in the Jar

¿Por qué no a little culture right where we live?

. . .

This little girl and her chihuahua live close by. 

I didn't have to travel to distant lands to meet them.

. . .

Oh -Yeahhhhh.... Listen In on   

My Pick-of-the-Month,

The Simple Romantic singing the  traditional American spiritual , Train is a-Comin' 

My Pick-of-the-Month  is Better than a Starbucks Pick-of-the-Week, cuz I brew it myself

. . .

I needed a break from my self-guided review of everything I’ve learned about Objective C (my apps writing class starts next week). So I walked over to the Menlo Park Farmer’s Market. The lovely-smelling narcissus from Bert’s Bulbs were all sold out by the time I got there.  Good for Bert! I wandered on to a vegetable stand that had a few daises and chrysanthemums left. While I was waiting in line with my two bunches, yellow and red always make a nice combination, an elderly man passed by on the other side of a table full of red and white carrots. He was clearly one of the vendors at the market and was carrying large plastic pails back to one of the trucks parked behind the stall I was visiting. The pail-carrying man’s skin was a similar pasty-color to my own – a hue that is typically called ‘white’ or, around here, ‘anglo’. His first language is likely English, as is mine.

The man accepting money from the market goers called out to him in Spanish and pasty-face nodded his head in agreement. I wasn’t paying much attention, I can’t always follow quickly paced Spanish phrases, but I think he said something about checking for more of a certain type of produce in the truck.

Another elderly man, also pasty-faced and wearing a blue jacket, was standing nearby  as the pail-carrying fellow walked past. “Did you understand any of that stuff he was saying”, this man called out loudly in a voice absolutely dripping with sarcasm. The elderly man heading towards the truck simply gave him a long look and continued on with his pails.

I turned my own head in the direction of the speaker. “¿Por qué no? (Why not?) ” I asked. Yes, it is pleasant when the right riposte comes to mind at the right moment! Especially when it comes to mind in a second language.

It was my turn to pay. The money-accepting man and I spoke only in Spanish. It isn’t that hard to remember how to say: How are you? Two (bunches of) flowers, thank you. Yes, that’s all, and finally, hasta luego (see you soon). The guy works at the farmer’s market. We both knew that he could have communicated with me quite easily in English. We just both wanted to make our point.

Here’s what I wonder about Señor Blue Jacket. Has the guy ever traveled out of the U.S.? Menlo Park is a wealthy area, and he looked pretty well off. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he’s gone more than once to another country. And I would bet you dollars to dinero, he’s gone to some place where people spoke a language other than English. What do you bet that he went because he wanted to have a cultural experience? Maybe he wanted to see something different and go where people didn’t act, dress and talk EXACTLY like they do in Menlo Park.

Hey, here’s a novel thought. He could have a cultural experience right here where he lives, if he had enough culture to try. He could listen in on the islander kids at the library. They like to put Tongan and Samoan words into Rap music. How many places do you hear that happening? He could go to Nak’s Market and ask about how the owner cooks up his supper. Maybe he could even learn a little Spanish and have a discussion with the produce seller at the farmer’s market about farming methods in the Salinas Valley, compared to those in Senora where the other man comes from. Those talks lead to other culturally-enriching discussions. Plus it’s just fun to learn to be friendly. And he wouldn’t even have to plunk down any money for a ticket out of here. Because we’ve got quite a lot of culture right here where we live, if he just opens his eyes and ears and appreciates it.

I suggest that we create a new day to add to those lists of things to celebrate like: Dolls Day, Teacher’s Day, Administrative Specialist Day and National Pie for Breakfast Day (that’s the day after Thanksgiving, my sister-in-law created it). Let’s make January 16’th “Speak Some Other Language Day”.

Let’s show a little culture.